Advance Micro Devices (AMD) said this week it is releasing
its six-core Opteron chip in June, well ahead of schedule, and
plans to follow it early next year with a chip code-named
Magny-Cours that will ship in eight- and 12-core models. After
that, it plans a 16-core chip in 2011.

These seem oriented to computation clusters as other than
massively parallel computations it is hard to imagine which
applications can make use of that many CPUs. It is not clear
for example whether currently any applications other than
graphics or video can make use of more then two CPUs, even if
some games seem to benefit from 3.

After a long time of using
RSS
as the feed format for changes to this site, I have decided to
switch to
Atom
for the
feed of updates to this site and blog
as it is a more descriptive language. However it has some
defects too, and in particular:

It does not have a
DTD
which does not allow validating using my favourite editing mode,
psgml.
I think I'll create a DTD eventually, as
validation is far too useful.

The Atom design is a classic of something I despise very
much, which is the perverse use of an
XML
instance for non-markup purposes, here is an example entry:

Note that the most elements elements are
pure markup with no contents. For example the category name
is in the title attribute and not be the
content of the category element is quite
difficult to imagine.